*Something I need to inform everyone who’s reading this blog post: I AM THE LEADER OF THIS SEMINAR.
My performance in the seminar:
Got a 7 for speaking and 8 for listening. Ella had one and a half classes for this seminar, and honestly speaking, I didn’t really perform well in the first class. Since I was the leader, I was busy linking everyone’s points and trying my best to let everyone have a chance to share their ideas and make rebuttals to what others had said. This directly relates to the fact that I did not have enough time to share my own opinions compared to when I’m not the leader (in short, it means that it’s harder to share your points because you need to manage the whole seminar). The evidence of this was that I only got a 4 and a 7 after Thursday’s class.
That’s really a challenge for me, and the only solution is that I need to try to make my points short and clear with high quality, not just repeating what my classmates have said. Due to this, I reflected overnight and changed my strategy on Friday, when we only had 20 minutes for the seminar. I tried to talk about the new ideas that hadn’t been mentioned and went deep into the points my classmates made. My plan worked out successfully: I scored three “highs” and got 7 and 8 at the end of the seminar.
The leaders’ way of managing the seminar:
Eliza and I were the leaders, and we tried a new approach of organizing the seminar: we screenshotted a few students’ blogs on mushroom, stuck them into a PPT, and let our classmates analyze what the blogs had done well (or what they still needed to improve). We also organized a debate on the importance of content versus images. The discussion went well, with everyone actively participating.
Speaking of management of the order of calling students (which is also very important because as a leader, you need to give everyone the same opportunities and encourage students with lower scores to express their thoughts more), Eliza and I agreed to call students in a fixed order (from right to left), so that everyone had a chance to speak. Links and rebuttals could be added after everyone had shared their thoughts. Moreover, I also used a 30‑second countdown during the last 10 minutes to remind the students to control their time.
What did I learn from the seminar:
1. Visual content is important: visual content is what attracts your audience at first glance and is also the core of writing blogs. Remember, people read blogs for fun, not for academic research.
2. About comments: comments can be categorized into three types: accomplishments, critical point‑outs, and harmful comments. For accomplishments, you get to feel good when you’re reading them, but they are not as important because they don’t really tell you how you can improve. Critical point‑outs are really something that could help you write a better blog post. Most of all, don’t care about intentional harmful comments – reading them can only make you feel worse and it’s just a waste of time.
Hmmmm very interesting: “We also organized a debate on the importance of content versus images.” I would’ve liked to participate.